Imagining staring at the rough stone walls
and the cold dirt floor
listening to the laughs and screams
of hyenas just outside.
Did it not require
a measure of hubris to think
“I will find another way”?
Absent outsize ambition
outsize courage
outsize confidence
would we ever have left our caves?
And everything that followed—
pyramids and ocean crossings
the Mona Lisa
Shakespeare’s plays
horseless carriages and electric lights
heart surgery, airplanes, iPhones
rockets blasting into space—
would any of it have come about
had no one ever dipped
into the spray of breaking waves
or soared to where the sun could melt
the wax on their beautiful wings?